


Homemakers

by Sophia_Prester



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Post-Book: Lies Sleeping, gratuitous references to GBBO, mentions of Peter/Beverley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 11:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophia_Prester/pseuds/Sophia_Prester
Summary: The problem wasn't Christmas itself, as annoying as it made things when you just had to nip down to the shop on a routine errand. The problem was that the Winter Solstice and all of the holidays that had accreted to it over the centuries made this time of year about as safe as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.At a very dangerous time of year, Peter is re-adjusting to being back at work, Nightingale has something on his mind, and the Folly's greatest defense comes from an unlikely (and delicious) source.





	Homemakers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joylee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joylee/gifts).



My return to the Folly at the start of November was surprisingly anti-climactic, all things considered. It took just shy of three months to officially clear me of any 'gross incompetence or clear and knowing breach of procedure' in Martin Chorley's death, with the investigation being less about assigning blame and more about making sure there weren't any oversights or other nasty surprises that could come back to bite someone else's career in the arse further down the line.

 Both process and outcome were much better than I had dared hoped for, and free enough from red tape that I would have bet two weeks of my newly reinstated salary that I'd be hearing from Tyburn about another favor owed to her.

 The other possibility was that Lesley - who I was refusing to refer to as 'the Faceless Woman,' thank you very much - was a far bigger worry than anyone was admitting out loud and they couldn't afford to put any talent out to pasture.

 It said something that I'd much rather owe the unnamed favor to Lady Ty. What that something was, I didn't care to think about it overmuch.

 In the end, though, the long and short of it was that I was back to work and everything was as it was before.

 Well, not entirely as it was. There were differences. Big ones.

 For one thing, there were more people, magical and non, in and out of the Folly than ever before, and Guleed stayed over more often than not. As for me, I didn't so much move back in as crash in my old room on those occasions when a very late night was going to be followed by a very early morning or I was just too knackered to get myself safely back to Bev's and my place.

 Another major change was that Foxglove was now as much a fixture around the place as Molly and showed just as little inclination to leave the premises. 

 I didn't really think about it much until one morning in early December, when I had stayed over after helping run a kelpie to ground (what was it with overly affluent white people and stupidly dangerous pets?). Nightingale and I were just sitting down to a well-deserved artery clogger of a breakfast when the sound of pots and pans in the kitchen shifted from the familiar sound of heavy things being moved from one hob to another to something more like a large man in plate armor doing the Electric Slide.

 "Does that happen frequently?" I asked.

 Nightingale sighed. "Only when there are, well, let's just call them _creative differences_."

  _As long as Foxglove doesn't substitute cadmium yellow for the mustard, we can deal with creative differences,_ I thought.

 Personally, though, I was less concerned with conflicting opinions on culinary arts or kitchen decor than I was with the subtlest yet biggest difference since my return: Nightingale.

 I couldn't really put my finger on what had changed about him, exactly. _Skittish_ wasn't the right word, nor was _distant_ , but it had aspects of both of those. Awkward was definitely in the mix, though. A good lot of awkward.

 The trigger of this new awkwardness between us wasn't any kind of mystery, because it had started right after I told Nightingale I was going to be a dad.

 (Well, the immediate reaction had been a gratifyingly boggle-eyed shock that I'd had the foresight to be prepared to catch on camera. Abigail now had the photo on her phone as Nightingale's contact image.)

 Nightingale had been sincere enough in his congratulations and I got the sense that he would be appropriately touched to be asked to be godfather, but the awkwardness was real and I wasn't sure I wanted to look at too closely. Looking at it closely would mean thinking about what it must be like to be over a century old, with neither you nor your friends reaching a quiet old age for very different reasons.

  _And_ it would mean thinking about what Lady Ty had said about her own children and what she feared for Bev.

 Like I said, it wasn't something I wanted to look at too closely. It was the sort of thing that could wait until the sprog was at university, if not later.

 Besides, right now, we had the issue of the holiday season to contend with. That was far more urgent than any kind of existential crisis.

 It used to be Christmas was a time to look forward to mostly hand-me-down gifts that would then be handed down to some younger cousin once you were deemed too old for them, and the occasional Lego set that would have to be guarded fiercely from handing-down.

 Next year, there would be the fun of the sprog's first Christmas.

 This year, I was rooting for the Grinch to come sailing down from Mount Crumpit to cancel the whole thing.

 The problem wasn't Christmas itself, as annoying as it made things when you just had to nip down to the shop on a routine errand. The problem was that the Winter Solstice and all of the holidays that had accreted to it over the centuries made this time of year about as safe as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

 If Lesley - or any of the other players who'd sprung up in the past few months to fill the void left by Martin Chorley - was going to do something big, now would be the time.

 So, instead of holiday cheer, everyone associated with the SAU was filled with a spirit of paranoia that got worse and worse the more and more anything big failed to happen.

 There were plenty of lesser problems cropping up, of course, so it wasn't like we were just sitting around on our duffs. This close to the solstice and with all kinds of emotions running high, everyday nuisances became increasingly nuisancy. We could barely take Toby for a walk without him false-alerting twice every block.

 Beyond the usual hauntings and dabbling-in-magic gone wrong, however, there were no signs of anything else going on. No murders that would get the SAU's attention. No shipping traffic or financial transactions that would suggest anything beyond the usual kind of malfeasance. In short, nothing significant.

 It felt like the part in the action film where the hero would pause dramatically and say, 'It's quiet. _Too_ quiet.'

 So, it almost came as a relief when we pulled into the mews behind the Folly and Nightingale stopped mid-sentence as soon as he cut the Jaguar's engine.

 The Folly had always been rich with _vestigium_ , but something had taken it up past eleven in the eight hours we'd been gone. Neither of us said anything, but I quietly powered down my phone.

 (In the hypothetical film where things were suddenly too quiet, this would be the moment the hero took the safety off his oversized firearm.)

 Nightingale didn't need to tell me to be careful as we got out of the car. He looked at me with one raised eyebrow, and I shrugged in response. We both took that to mean agreement that we should head inside.

 There wasn't anything strange about the _vestigium_ other than how much of it there was. It felt like the Folly, but there was just more of it. Simpler, perhaps, and rougher, but still the Folly.

 And not just the Folly. I got an impression of Nightingale's _signare_ , and something I recognized as my own, although it was strange the way your own voice is strange when you hear a recording of it, or you see yourself in a photograph instead of a mirror.

 And that wasn't all.

 "Silk," Nightingale whispered.

 Yes. There it was. The whatever-it-was that I heard-slash-felt whenever Guleed used her more specialized martial arts. There were other impressions as well. Things that weren't quite _signare,_ but were damned close to it and were clear enough to allow me to tack an identity to each one. Walid. Vaughan. Caffrey. And, so help me, even Abigail. Nearly everyone I'd come to associate with the Folly.

 "You don't sense her either, do you?" Nightingale asked without needing to explain who he meant.

 I shook my head. No, there was nothing in there that reminded me of a seagull's cry. Or a razor strop for that matter.

 "Still, let me go in first," Nightingale said, opening the door and stepping in before I could protest. I followed in close enough behind him to nearly collide with him when he stopped short, gasping in a breath that almost sounded pained.

 "Do you smell it? Do you hear it?" he asked me before I could ask him what was wrong.

 I took a deep breath, half-expecting it to be something foul and therefore nearly being floored when it wasn't.

 The first thing I smelled was ginger and cinnamon and lots of it: no surprise, given that Molly had been baking up a storm for the past week. But then, beneath that, was

  _pepper and lots of it, the perfume my dad bought my mom every Christmas, bay rum and industrial cleaner and shea butter and weed, a hiss-and-pop that was both onions in a hot pan and the sound of a needle being placed gently down on an old vinyl record_

 home.

 "Yeah," I said, voice thicker than I cared to admit. "What's it smell like to you?"

 "Casterbrook."

 Oh.

 We continued inside, and I had no idea what the hell to say that wouldn't be painfully awkward. At least the weird amplification of the Folly's _vestigium_ had died down to where it didn't register over the smell of Molly's baking. The strong snap of _home_ was still there, but only as a persistent tickle at the back of the mind.

 "Whatever it is doesn't _feel_ malignant," Nightingale said, "but you know as well as I do that doesn't - "

 We stopped, once again mid-stride and mid-sentence, at the edge of the atrium.

 "Good heavens," Nightingale said, breathless and wondering.

 It wasn't exactly eloquent, but given I couldn't get out a single word, not even a 'wow,' I wasn't in a place to criticize.

 Someone - I had no way of knowing if it was Molly or Foxglove - had set up a table in front of Newton's venerable bust. The table was swaddled in a deep red cloth that was long enough to pool artistically on the floor, and the top was bedecked in drifts of 'snow' that I suspected was made of candy floss.

 All of this was in service of the centerpiece that took up most of the table - a gingerbread replica of the Folly that was a good half-meter high.

 Now, most of the more traditional gingerbread houses I had seen up close and personal were a) the kind you made from a kit you could pick up at Tesco and that never looked as good as the picture on the box b) artfully childish in a way no actual child could ever hope to achieve or c) something that might have happened if Mad King Ludwig's favorite architect had been turned loose in a candy shop.

 This, though...

 When it came to biscuit architecture, I would not have expected a Georgian terrace to be a compelling subject. Elegant as they were, they were essentially boxes laid end to end with other boxes, and their fiercely regular facades didn't have the kind of gables or ornamentation that lent themselves to fanciful reinterpretation in pastry.

 But, honest to God, this was one of the most sweetly (pardon the pun) whimsical things I had ever seen.

 It was clearly made of biscuit and candy and icing through and through. The sides were classic gingerbread, with the stonework on the ground story made of what looked like thin pieces of carefully cut and placed shortbread. The chocolate and sugar work railings along the front and under the windows looked close to the real thing, but the brightly colored boiled-sweet windows and the gumdrop chimney pots didn't even make a passing attempt at realism.

 The windows even glowed from the inside with a flickering warmth that suggested actual candles. And, as if being made of gingerbread wasn't Christmasy enough on its own, the door and windows had tiny wreaths made of what I assumed was rice cereal mixed with marshmallow and food coloring and finished off with cinnamon candies and little fondant bows.

 "Well, that's worth a Hollywood Handshake," I muttered. It wasn't meant to be overheard, but I heard a breathy little gasp that was halfway to being a laugh.

 Sometime while Nightingale and I were transfixed by the gingerbread house, Molly and Foxglove had come up to see what we thought of their work.

 Because it was clearly _their_ work, with Molly's culinary skills and Foxglove's artistry both being brought into equal play.

 "This is absolutely magnificent. Breathtaking," Nightingale said. "Thank you, both of you."

 If he sounded a little choked up, I wasn't going to mention it.

 Molly gave a closed-lipped smile that still managed to look as if she was about to giggle in glee, and Foxglove looked as purely happy as I'd ever seen her as she waved me and Nightingale to come around and look at the back.

 It wasn't just the Folly they'd made. The mews and carriage house were there as well. The mews was paved with nougat, and the gingerbread carriage house had a glazed roof made of what I was pretty sure were melted down Glacier mints. Even the wrought iron staircase going up to my tech cave was there, a peppermint stick pole with a spiral of chocolate wedges. I had to laugh to see that the light inside was the steady gleam of a LED instead of the candles that were in the Folly proper.

 I had a sudden urge to see if I could lift away one of the walls of the Folly or of the carriage house, half suspecting that if I did, I would see marzipan carpets and biscuit books, iced bun chesterfields and puff-pastry beds, and a little bust of Isaac Newton made of sugar paste.

 But then Foxglove, not even trying to conceal her glee, lifted off the roof of the Folly. Molly reached in and took out biscuit after biscuit, placing each one in the mews.

 They were all (mostly all) gingerbread people decorated in the classic style with royal icing. They were all a little cartoonish and a little simple, but that didn't mean they weren't skillfully done. Nightingale was clearly Nightingale, and I was clearly me. Toby was there (although about as proportionately large as a Newfoundland compared to the humans) and my cookie self held one end of his licorice whip leash. There were also Drs. Walid and Vaughan (although the flecks of 'blood' on their royal-icing lab coats didn't go well with their little cookie smiles unless you took a particularly cynical view of things), Frank Caffrey (made from a larger cookie cutter that put him more in proportion to Toby) and a suitably unimpressed Abigail. Guleed was the only one of us with more than royal icing as decoration, as either Molly or Foxglove had fashioned her a hijab of pink fondant. There were even two other biscuits I didn't quite recognize, but thought might be some of the newcomers from Patrick Gale's merry little band, the ones who were starting to feel more like members of the team rather than occasional reluctant visitors.

 Then, oddly enough, Foxglove pulled out a gingerbread car that was far too small for any of the gingerbread people to ride in. The color marked it as Bev's although the shape was was entirely wrong.

 "Oh, very clever," Nightingale said, both amused and pleased. Then, before I could say anything brilliant and incisive like 'why a car?' he went on to explain:

 "You see, doing a more figurative representation of a goddess such as Beverley might be seen as, well, presumptuous. Especially if it was something meant to be consumed. I think Beverley might not take it too ill, but..."

 But Ty would blow a gasket. And so might Mama Thames.

 "Let's just say that doing her car was an excellent and well thought out compromise," he concluded.

 From the way Molly looked smug and Foxglove looked both chastened and disgruntled, I had a sneaking suspicion what might have been the cause of their 'creative differences' the other day.

 Last of all, Foxglove reached in with both hands, carefully bringing out not one, but two biscuits that had melded together slightly while baking.

 Molly and Foxglove. Holding hands.

 I didn't trust myself to say anything and clearly, neither did Nightingale. We stood there for a while, hunched over so we could take in every detail of their project. Me, I focused on the buildings and all the new details I found each time I looked, like the little biscuit lintel over the front door, or the way a very thin and improbably straight churro had been used for the molding between the second and third stories.

 As for Nightingale, he was more interested in the people and picked up biscuit-Walid. He'd gone for me at first, but the leash gave him pause. At first, I thought he might bite Walid's head off, but no, he just studied it for a while, then put it down even more carefully than Molly had. Then it was Abigail's turn. Then Caffrey's. And so on down the line until he came back to me. This time, he picked up both me and Toby, careful of the leash. He studied us for a longer time than he did any of the others before putting us back. Then he picked up Molly and Foxglove, making sure not to break apart their joined hands.

 "These are absolutely exquisite," he said with a kind of deliberation that indicated he wished he could say much, much more. "This is... It's good. It's very good. I hadn't - " He cleared his throat. "I hadn't expected there to be quite so many people."

 There was no way to give him privacy, so instead I picked up biscuit-Guleed to take a better look. Up close, I could see how glittery pink dots had been painted onto the slightly paler pink of her fondant hijab.

 I couldn't help but think of a biscuit that could have been there, one with a fondant mask. Or, in a better and fairer world, one with no mask at all, and with a smile that was perky even in biscuit form.

 I put biscuit-Guleed back before I accidentally broke her.

 "Star baker for sure, I'd say," I told them. Foxglove looked confused, but Molly smiled so wide she had to cover her mouth with both hands. "I don't plan on using the tech cave the next day or two if you want to do a marathon viewing and get Foxglove caught up on things."

 I don't think Molly had ever been so pleased with me before. It was a nice feeling.

 

* * *

 

The Big One (as I had been coming to think of it) finally dropped two days later, exactly at solar noon on the Winter Solstice itself.

 It's funny, how some things can make you think both 'oh shit' and 'it's about bloody time' all at once.

 The best way I can think to describe it was an invisible flash of light, something startling and blinding the way a nuclear blast is said to be. When it happened, my first thought was that something had been unloaded right on top of us. It wasn't until much later that we learned Lesley had sacrificed the last remnants of a minor Roman god over at the Barbican.

 Me and Nightingale? We'd been in Battersea, fully five miles away and on the far side of the Thames.

 We had just twigged to the fact that our trip to Battersea had been in pursuit of a goose of the proverbial wild variety when the shockwave of the god's death crashed over us.

 For a good hot second, I thought that was it, so long, sorry I didn't get to say goodbye, Bev. Sorry I never got to meet you, sprog.

 And then it was over. There'd been the invisible flash and the terror of something very old dying in agony, and then it was gone as if it had been sucked up by a vacuum.

 Still, it took us a few minutes to do the equivalent of blinking the spots from our eyes.

 Tamsin - one of Patrick Gale's crew who'd come with us as backup (yes, we were _that_ strapped for resources) - stared at me and Nightingale as if we'd lost our minds. Whatever it was, hadn't impacted her. That could be due to her lack of magical experience.

 It could also be that the attack had been targeted and not the magical equivalent of a carpet bomb.

 "It came from that direction," Nightingale rasped, pointing roughly northeast.

 'That direction' was towards the Folly. It was also towards the Barbican, not that we knew anything about that just then.

 I had never before or since known Nightingale to get through London traffic as fast as he did that day. I'm not even sure we had the spinner on to help us get through.

 "We were lured away, weren't we?" I asked.

 I got little more than a grunt in response, which was not typical of Nightingale.

 "And it was aimed at us, yeah?" I didn't care if Nightingale had gone non-verbal. I needed to figure this out.

 "After a fashion," he said after too long a pause. I tried not to look at how close we were coming to hitting other cars and the occasional pedestrian. It wasn't focused on us as individuals. I _know_ what those attacks feel like. The last time I felt something like this - "

 The word _Ettersburg_ filled the abrupt silence, and I knew he was talking about spells that hadn't targeted Thomas Nightingale as a single individual, but ones that had targeted a larger but still defined group of soldiers and practitioners of which he was just one small, if powerful part.

 Whatever this was, it had targeted the SAU - maybe the Folly itself - and Nightingale had been too far away to do a damned thing about it.

 So yeah, I could get why he might not feel much like talking at the moment. I didn't much, either.

 We screeched into the mews at a rough angle, nearly plowing into Frank Caffrey as he came out the back. He gave us a 'what the hell?' look and seemed more concerned about Nightingale's driving than anything happening in the Folly.

 I rolled down the window to ask him what the hell was going on.

 "I'm just going to nip over to Roti Chai to pick up something for lunch," he said before I could get a word out. "Molly's upset about something gone wrong in the kitchen or some such, so I don't think she'll be cooking any time soon."

 Nightingale barely had the presence of mind to do anything more than turn off the car, so it was left to yours truly to pass along an order for the both of us. If Nightingale wasn't in the mood for lamb kebab, then so be it.

 "No word from anyone of any disturbances?" I asked, because something _had_ happened. Just because it didn't happen to the Folly didn't mean it wasn't catastrophic. Still, the fact that Caffrey was nothing more than a little annoyed did a lot to put my mind at ease.

 "Not a peep," he said. "Should I get a double order of samosas?"

 Once Caffrey left under advisement to make it a triple, Nightingale and I headed inside without a word, and it was a strong and sudden flashback to a few days ago, when we'd felt this sense of _moreness_ coming from inside the Folly.

 The _moreness_ was gone, replaced by a not-at-all magical and highly unpleasant smell of something left too long in the oven. I couldn't be sure, but the quasi- _signare_ of _home_ was still there, if somewhat overpowered by the burnt smell.

 "Molly?" Nightingale called out. Of course he'd call out for her first - she had been by his side longer than anyone else who was still around. "Is everything all right?"

 "In here!" Guleed shouted from the atrium.

 As we had the other day, we stopped mid-stride, startled by the sight in front of us.

 The gingerbread Folly was a ruin. The candy-floss snow had shriveled to burnt and acrid caramel. Much of the gingerbread itself had been reduced to charcoal. Where it hadn't, the chocolate railings and boiled sweet windows now oozed down the remains. The Glacier mint roof of my tech cave had collapsed entirely and had fused to the LED inside.

 The less said about all the little biscuit denizens, the better. The only one that was even close to untouched, ironically enough, was Bev's car.

 I held the back of my hand up to where the gingerbread looked especially torched.

 "Still warm," I said.

 "Yeah. Frank has me standing here with this, just in case it's not out-out," Guleed said, waving a small fire extinguisher. "What on earth happened, anyway? Poor Molly's a wreck. Foxglove's trying to help, not that she's doing much better herself. They must have spent _days_ on that thing. I guess one of the candles inside caught or something."

 I waited for Nightingale to offer an explanation that wasn't just a wild guess, but all he did was stare at the wreckage with a haunted expression.

 "Did you feel that magic explosion about twenty minutes back?" I asked Guleed.

 She shrugged. "Does having a sudden and thankfully brief migraine count?"

 I shrugged right back at her. By then, Nightingale had recovered enough to rejoin us in the twenty-first century.

 "I'm not sure what kind of fae magic Molly and Foxglove put into their creation, or even if they did so consciously." He took a moment to reach out and prod at the remaining bit of roofline. It crumbled under his touch. "It's only a guess on my part, but perhaps with all of Molly's years living here and caring for its people had something to do with it. With Foxglove's artistic talent to help her make it a powerful and believable representation, I think she managed to create something strong enough to draw away a powerful attack aimed at the Folly itself."

 None of us said anything. I thought about a biscuit that could have - _should have_ \- been there, one with a perky smile and without a fondant mask.

 "Or so it would seem," Nightingale said when the silence had cone on a little too long.

 Was he thinking about the unthinkable numbers who had been lost seventy years ago? Or was it the few who had been spared this recent attack so they could either stand around looking at burnt pastry or head out in search of kebabs?

 Maybe he was thinking of both at once, much like I was thinking about Bev and also about my parents, and how so many things were even more fragile than gingerbread.

 Thank god for Guleed, who pouted as she poked at a peppermint lamp post. "I never even got a chance to take a photo."

 "I took several. I'll text them to you," I promised.

 

* * *

 

It wasn't any one thing that finally pointed me to the cause of Nightingale's strange mood.

 The gingerbread Folly and its fate contributed, as did the noticeably enhanced sensory impression of _home_ that still pervaded the brick-and-mortar Folly on Christmas Eve.

 So did the impromptu meal of kebabs and samosas once Frank got back, and the way Nightingale made sure we held back a share for Tamsin, who eventually appeared complaining bitterly about being abandoned in Battersea with no explanation.

 Another pointer came on the twenty-third, when Jennifer came by with a cheese tray, some good wine, and some useless, tacky gifts to celebrate an early Christmas with us before heading back to her parents' place in Wales. "You do realize that you all drive me one hundred percent batty, but it feels wrong not to have a little bit of Christmas together."

 It turned out to be a very nice evening, for all that the brie was off and tasted vaguely of ammonia.

 It all came together, however, on Christmas Eve day. I was bunking at the Folly while Bev was staying with her mother and sisters for the holiday. I planned to nip over for a few hours on the day of, of course, but there was a limit to how many knowing (Mama Thames) murderous (Ty) or amused (everyone else) looks I was willing to tolerate at one go.

 I had gone out to the shops early in the morning after a sudden burst of inspiration that hadn't accounted for all the other last minute shoppers that would be out there, and so I wasn't back until close to lunchtime. The echo of my parents' apartment had faded, but I was still hit by a wave of _it's good to be home_ as soon as I stepped inside.

 The more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe magic had nothing to do with it.

 I got to the dining room just as Molly was plating up lunch. Her glare told me I was in trouble for almost being late. It was a good match for the glare I would get from my mother under similar circumstances.

 "Sorry, but I had to stop in at Borough Kitchen for a last minute gift," I announced cheerfully.

 "Oh? Something for Beverley?" Nightingale asked.

 "No." I smiled and held out a small gift bag to Molly. I had another one for Foxglove, but she was probably in the tech cave binge-watching something. Molly stared at me in puzzlement (as did Nightingale), but once I nodded at her to go ahead she was quick to snatch the bag and open it.

 The first thing she pulled out was the Borough Kitchen catalog I had rolled up and tucked inside. I expected to find it on the dining room table a few days from now, with half the pages dog-eared and various items on those pages helpfully circled by way of a hint.

 Next was a trio of brightly colored sanding sugars. (Foxglove's version of the gift bag contained a Cass Art catalog and what I had been told were very nice watercolors.)

 "There are two more things," I said, as the remaining items in the bag were rather light and I didn't want them to end up accidentally being thrown out.

 She rummaged around in the tissue paper and finally pulled out a small copper biscuit cutter in the shape of a fox.

 "Given how things are going with Abigail, you may want that next year," I said.

 Molly stared at me a moment with an expression that I couldn't name, but was caught somewhere between wonder and heartbreak. Then she pulled out the last item.

 The shape of it was hard to interpret if you didn't know what it was supposed to be. It would depend on the icing to make it look right, which seemed to be a thing with higher-end biscuit cutters.

 Molly held it up and tilted her head in a question.

 "It's a baby carriage," I said. "We'll definitely be needing _that_ next year. I'm not sure if you'd need to treat the sprog the same way you treated Bev, biscuit-wise, but I thought it _oof!"_

 Molly had caught me in a quick but emphatic hug before scuttling off either in embarrassment at her lapse or to go show Foxglove her loot.

 As for Nightingale, he was giving me a look that was both puzzled and hopeful. "Next year?" he asked, and I recalled Bev's caustic remarks when I asked her how her pregnancy would impact her degree.

 "I'm going to be a dad, not going off on a five-year sabbatical to Greenland. You're not getting rid of me _that_ easily."

 Nightingale gave a delighted bark of laughter before tucking back into his lunch. "No, I suppose not," he said.

 There was a lot that could be said just then, about friends and family who were lost. Some were just plain gone, like all of Nightingale's peers who were taken by war or old age. And then there were those who were a different kind of lost. People like Lesley.

 But some could be found again, I thought, picturing the way Molly's hand had gone to her heart when we brought Foxglove to the Folly, or the way my dad was slowly getting his shit back together after all these years. And then there were the people who managed to creep in through the cracks over the years. People like Dr. Walid, or Guleed, or Nightingale himself.

 "Besides," I said around a mouthful of steak and ale pie, "if you're going to be the sprog's godfather like I hope you'll be, that means you're officially family, according to Abigail."

 There was a startled blankness, and then a smile that made him look _actually_ young for a change.

 "Well, if _Abigail_ says so..."

 I laughed. Both because neither of us would be surprised if Abigail was running this place in a decade or so, and because the awkwardness of the past few months was gone. It might have shifted into another sort of awkwardness (we're British, and awkwardness is unavoidable when the talk shifts towards anything resembling feelings), but Foxglove stormed in just then, silently demanding her gift as Molly hissed in laughter behind her hand and Nightingale just shook his head indulgently.

 It wasn't the kind of life I'd pictured for myself even a few years ago, but it felt like home.


End file.
